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Any motherboard not made in China/Taiwan

01-22-2012, 11:35 AM

After seeing lately the working condition at Foxconn I was a little shocked. I somehow convinced myself that tech worker got better treated than textile worker... Any body know of motherboard maker that makes thing somewhere else than China/Taiwan or at least try to offer more decent conditions/wages than the 10 people in a room + 0.31$/hr at Foxconn?

I would be also interested in this and also searched a bit. But it seems to me that every motherboard is manufactured in China or Taiwan.

Earlier today I read a news about ARM-based Raspberry Pi computer. After reading your thread I wondered where this is manufactured. On their homepage it says that their first intention was to manufacture it in Britain, but due to lack of suitable UK manufacturers and also because of following reason they manufacture it in Taiwan or China now (well for this low price, it would have been a surprise, if it were different).

[...]
I’d like to draw attention to one cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain,[...]

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Foxconn is a budget vendor. It does not surprise me at all thay they don't care about the working conditions. But I have no idea if there are other vendors doing it better.

It's not really about Foxconn; they're just a prominent example in the press right now because they have big-name customers like Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Sony, etc.. It's rumored that they also make motherboards for EVGA, Intel, and a couple others. But whichever motherboard brand you get, the actual manufacturing is probably done in a Foxconn-like factory even if it's not actually Foxconn.

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That's true. There are also many Foxconn parts, mainly back panel connectors, visible on motherboards from other manufacturer. (By the way, I didn't yet know EVGA made motherboards... apparently they don't sell in the Netherlands)

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After some more investigations and discussion at the water fountain, I discovered CP Systems. I had never heard of them before, someone I know told me they researched and found them during the "buy in the USA" budget provision. Hardly mainstream however. Perhaps there some other company selling more mainstream motherboard to satisfy some of those USA only provisions...

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Consumer electronics production seems to have pretty much all moved to Asia, but industrial/embedded/server motherboards still seem to be happening locally. I did a quick search for USA but you can probably find them built in most other regions as well :

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Taiwan, China controls about 90% of the motherboard industry. It's not up to you to choose where your motherboard comes from. The oligarchs at the U.S. regime decide this. If you are compliant to U.S. imperialist demands, then they throw a certain market at you. For example, South Korea gets a concesions for their role in the destabilisation of the Korean peninsula, and support for U.S. military aggression. That's why you see all these Samsung, and Hyundai products. Japan gets automobile, and video game concesions for their role in destabilising east Asia, hosting U.S. bases, and also supporting U.S. military aggression in general. Taiwan gets the motherboard concesion for their role in destabilising China. Hong Kong is also in a similar position. They get finance concesions for destabilising China. Thailand gets tourist concesions for hosting CIA black sites, and cooperating with western imperialism in general. The moral of the story is, if you do something dodgy, then you get rewarded with concesions. As far as sweat shops, western oligarchs love that, and usually have to overthrow a few democracies in order to achieve those results. The less rights workers have, the happier the western ruling class is.

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Of course, the working conditions are bad in sweatshop factories. But you also have to consider, that those factories bring a huge amount of income to a poor country. If people stopped buying motherboards because they were made in sweatshops, a lot of very poor people would lose their only source of income.

I think the best way to solve this on a global scale would be some kind of trade agreement which puts businesses responsible for the working conditions of their outsourced factories, as well as domestic ones. This however goes directly against the interest of the corporations, who would stand to lose some money, so it's not very likely to happen without some large political changes.